The user interface is actually controlled by the region that you visit so that, for example, you can make the avatar disappear altogether. You’re just a disembodied presence looking around a build — like in a 3D design program.

“This mode is something that I wanted to do for a long time in order to make these wonderful worlds accessible to people who don’t like to see themselves as avatars,” Lopes wrote in a post about the new viewer yesterday. “We are going to use this mode in urban planning applications, as these environments become more like the modeling tools that urban planners are familiar with.”

“This is nothing short of an epic moment for OpenSim,” said Kay McLennan, a professor at Tulane University and a virtual worlds educator.

The new, avatar-free OnLook interface.

In the screenshot above, for example, all you see of me is my disembodied hair.

“For this alpha release, you will still see your attachments, if you have them, but we are working to make them invisible too, to make it truly ‘camera-only’,” Lopes said.

To use this on your own grid, you will need to install server-side modules. You can then configure the buttons on the viewer or the list of possible destinations to make it extremely easy to use.

Maria Korolov is editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years and has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and Computerworld and has reported from over a dozen countries, including Russia and China.

AlanTupper

Personally I’m quite excited by what OnLook means for the future of viewer development. Combining this with other recent developments such as Intels’ Dispatcher system really begins to open up a universe of potential uses for Opensim that have been just out of reach.

built with glibc-2.17 so you will need slackware 14.1 and higher ubuntu 13.04 and higher.
or any distro that is using glibc-2.17 or higher

RJ

This viewer just came to my rescue! An old bug in both Firestorm and official Second Life viewer; instant crash on texture upload, has left them both essentially unusuable But OnLook is completely unaffected. Also it renders varregion terrain with staggering speed. Firestorm just seems to choke with varregions. Keep up the good work. It’s light, fast and makes the most popular viewers seem like bloatware.